AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Why the hell was this meeting delayed for over a week?” I snap as the two of us head to the conference room. We booked an entire room for this meeting, so it better be good.
“She was out sick,” he says.
“Bullshit.”
“No, really. I called her doctor.”
I stop walking and turn to look at my brother. “Doesn’t that violate HIPPA?”
He shrugs, and I realize that there’s more to Phoenix than meets the eye. There’s a darkness there. I don’t really like to think about it much. Phoenix is the type of person who has broken more hearts than I could possibly imagine, yet he’s done it with a smile on his face. I’ll never tell him, but sometimes I really miss his wife. She never would have let things get this far.
“What else did you learn?” I’m not about to play Mom to my brother.
“Not much. She’s been out. She’s stayed at her apartment. She has a prescription. An antibiotic.”
“Is she contagious?”
“No.”
I don’t ask anything else because we arrive at the conference room and enter without knocking. Allison is waiting. She’s standing at the head of the table with a cup of coffee in her hand.
“Gentlemen,” she says. She’s pale. Her bun looks sloppy. Her clothes are slightly wrinkled. If I didn’t believe she was sick before, I definitely do now. Allison Green is many things, but she’s never sloppy. “What’s this about?”
“Project Sunshine,” Phoenix says. He cuts straight to the point: no bullshit. She sighs as she plops into a seat.
“There’s nothing to report about the project.”
“We know what it is,” I say. “We know what our father was doing.”
“Helping kids?” Allison asks. “Helping the youth find homes? I’m sorry, but how is that a bad thing?”
“It’s a bad thing when these are illegal adoptions for kids who could have had families take them in.”
Allison falters for a second. Wait. What? She wasn’t expecting me to say that. Did she not know? It seems impossible that she might actually not know about my father’s little project, especially since she’s the one running it now.
“That’s not what this is,” she says.
“Yeah, it is.” Phoenix shoves a piece of paper at her. Allison starts to tremble as she picks it up and looks at it.
“What is this?”
“It’s a list of the kids our dad ‘helped,’” he says. “Want to explain why you didn’t tell us about this sooner?”
“Your dad told me that this was a placement program,” she whispers. “We work with attorneys who help us place the kids with couples who want to adopt. It’s basically like being our own adoption agency. We work with kids, but the main thing we do is work with displaced animals. We work with animal shelters.”
“That’s not the situation,” Phoenix says. He looks at Allison, staring at her the same way I am. Maybe she’s lying, but maybe she doesn’t actually know.
Is there a chance we’ve been wrong about her?
I think back to Phoenix’s comments about her sleeping with our dad. Why do we think that? Is it something that could have actually happened? Or is that something our stepmother, Megan, might have said? Rumors are such tricky things. They don’t actually make a lot of sense until they start to spiral and grow. Then they expand. Then they get bigger. Then they destroy everything.
“It is,” she repeats. She looks stressed, insistent. “He wasn’t performing illegal adoptions. We aren’t...that’s not the situation.”
“Allison,” I say sharply, interjecting, “we know.”
“You know?”
“We know everything. We know my father was abducting kids from foster care, mostly runaways. We know he was selling them to the highest bidder. We understand his attorney was in on the entire situation. We know it’s messy. What I don’t know is why the project is still running after his death. What I really don’t know is your role in the entire thing.”
